Modded: Epiphone Sheraton II
Every now and then, you pick up a guitar and it’s perfect from minute one (or at least, right after a quick setup). Other times, you’ve got to take a perfectly good guitar and completely overhaul it just to make it your own. This is the story of a perfectly good guitar that fell victim […]
Failure – The Heart Is a Monster
After nearly two decades between albums, Los Angeles’s Failure recently released their fourth full-length, The Heart Is a Monster. Much more than a spiritual successor to 1996’s Fantastic Planet, The Heart Is a Monster almost seems as if the band never went on hiatus to begin with and easily could’ve released this around 1998. The […]
The Darkness – Last of Our Kind
Remember that crazy song (and even CRAZIER music video) “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” by The Darkness? I know I do. It came out in the early aughts, and I will probably never forget it. I still pick it when I’m out doing karaoke with friends. I was thrilled when I stumbled upon […]
New Gear Report: PreSonus Studio 192 & Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2
PreSonus Studio 192 USB Audio Interface I see the Studio 192 as PreSonus’ answer to the other hot rackmount audio interfaces coming out this year (see Universal Audio Apollo series; Focusrite Clarett series). Unlike those Thunderbolt interfaces, the Studio 192 is USB 3.0. And man, this thing shoves a LOT of I/O through a USB […]
mewithoutYou – Pale Horses
mewithoutYou has been a favorite band of mine for the better part of the past 15 years. The guitar tones on their sophomore LP, “Catch for Us the Foxes” were seminal to the development of my own guitar playing style, and the “quiet/loud” songwriting tactics they introduced in their debut, “A→B Life” have had untold […]
Body Shop: Grand Auditorium
In my last post I gave some love to the mighty Dreadnought style of acoustic guitar, but this time we’re going to be scaling the size down to talk about the Grand Auditorium. This style is an incredibly popular choice for many good reasons, most of which I’ll be covering here. After all, Taylor Guitars refers […]
Ask zZounds: Active and Passive Basses
Active vs. Passive Basses: What’s the Difference? Bass pickups fall into one of two categories: active and passive. This distinction in pickups is such a fundamental part of electric bass construction that most bass amps have separate inputs for active and passive basses. Of course, electric basses can be broken up by a number of criteria, like number […]
Jazmine Sullivan – Reality Show
Here at zZounds we try to keep it 100. At least I do. Up top, or in the post, you’ll see an embedded link to audio for Philly-born Jazmine Sullivan’s album Reality Show released early this year. What you’re going to miss by hearing this clean version of her album is what makes it an unqualified success. It’s […]
QUITAPENAS (self-titled)
A thumping bass line, hand percussion, vicious guitar and chanting vocals? When I first heard “Valle Moreno,” the intense opening cut from self-titled LP QUITAPENAS, I was almost convinced I was listening to a B-side from another latin rock group’s self-titled debut, though that one was released in 1969… Each song off this record introduces a new facet of QUITAPENAS’ […]
